Making a Game – Report 19

18Oct

What I did

Well this ended up being a productive couple of weeks. Not only did I manage to do everything I’d set out for this sprint, I managed to get a couple of bonus tasks completed too.

I tied up the health bars which were still sort of broken from my multiplayer attempt. Health bars are now rotating to point towards the correct camera when it moves and rotates and the health levels shown in the team roster is also updated correctly. While fixing that I also noticed that the health bar shown in the character details pop up was also trying to rotate, but as it’s part of the UI it just looked kind of weird from certain angles. Apparently I’d added a script to it at some point telling it to keep pointing at the camera. Not sure when I’d made that change, but after removing it everything looks fine again.

After that I could finally start on the strategic view, or world map. For starters when you begin a new game you’re taken to the world map initially. From there you can select an enemy territory and choose to attack it. There’s placeholders to show information about these territories and the teams that hold them but for now shows no real info (that’s something I’ll be working on in my next sprint).

Each territory is different depending on which team holds it, and attacking different ones takes you into battle with a different group of enemies. When the battle ends, whether you win or lose, you’re taken back to the world map to continue playing.

What I didn’t do

Nothing for a nice change, a very productive sprint.

What I will do next time

I got a lot more done this past sprint than I expected, so this month I plan to finish off the rest of the world map changes, and expand the combat mode some more.

First up is expanding the world map to include a larger number of territories. From there each team will own several territories and you can choose which one you want to attack, winning that territory if you win the resulting combat or losing one of your own if you lose. With that in mind, I’ll also add some information to the territories which will pop up when it’s selected. It makes sense that you can only attack bordering territories too, slowly working your way to the edge map where the enemy team’s more heavily protected home base will be (that will come later).

I will update the combat mode to randomly place team members within their starting area, which will let me increase team sizes to more than 3 members. I also want to add in some team customisation options which you can accessed from the world map. For now you will view existing teams, change their equipped weapon, create new team members (specifying name and loading in an image for the face), and dismiss existing ones. To aid things I’ll also make this persistent so that the team data saves and loads in the background.

That’s all for this coming sprint. This may look like a short list (and it’s easily one of my shorter reports), but as you’ll see from my Trello board there’s actually quite a few tasks involved in this.